The trial of the two young women who beheaded and dismembered a boy begins

The trial of the heinous crime that shocked the country begins today, February 24, in the Court of Portimão. A 21-year-old boy lost his life after being strangled, maimed, beheaded and dismembered.

The remains of Diogo Gonçalves were discovered about 150 kilometers away: the head, arms and feet were found near a lake at Pego do Inferno in Tavira, and the decapitated trunk and remaining body parts were rescued from the base of a cliff near Fortaleza de Beliche, at the other end of the Algarve, in Sagres.

Nurse, Mariana Fonseca and friend Maria Malveiro, who worked as a security guard at the same hotel where Diogo Gonçalves was a computer engineer, confessed to the crime of qualified homicide, desecration of a corpse, theft and fraud, but according to the Expresso newspaper, Mariana Fonseca took over (but later backed off), having been an accomplice in the preparation and execution of the murder.

Almost a year after the macabre murder, the two girls, aged 20 and 24, are on trial accused of killing Diogo Gonçalves for €70,000 that the boy had received in compensation for the death of his mother.

Before the trial, and even after the prosecutor accused the two girls of qualified homicide, desecration of a corpse, theft and fraud, "the defense of Maria Malveiro asked the court to make a psychiatric examination of the suspect not only to determine her degree of inimputability, but also her 'psychophysical picture' at the time of the crime, as well as 'her ability to assess the scope of his actions' and her level of danger then and now.

According to the four-page report, the girl who confessed to asphyxiating her colleague and then dismembered him with a cleaver and even cut off the victim's thumb and index finger to access his cell phone and MB Way,

”She has no psychiatric symptoms that allow any diagnosis of mental illness to be made”. The psychiatrist who observed her noted that the defendant confessed "regret" for the crime, but did not "outline" any "emotional manifestation when describing the situation". She is, and was, "capable of distinguishing between good and evil" and therefore cannot be considered "inimitable".